The present invention relates to a picture processing apparatus, a picture processing method, a picture taking apparatus, and a program. More particularly, the invention relates to a picture processing apparatus, a picture processing method, a picture taking apparatus, and a program for having similar scenes associated with one another for easy handling.
Falling prices of video cameras in recent years have prompted these devices to become widely available. With their enclosures getting smaller than ever, the video cameras can let people take moving pictures easily wherever they are. Moving pictures are also taken casually through the use of a moving picture pickup feature incorporated in mobile phones and digital still cameras.
Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2004-62868 discloses techniques for recording the names of recorded subjects as meta data about picked-up pictures. These and other techniques exist which allow a variety of attribute information to be added to the picked-up pictures with a view to facilitating subsequent handling of the pictures. Illustratively, some business-use video cameras are designed to add such attributes as the weather during picture taking, locations, sound volumes, and thumbnails representative of clips (each clip is composed of moving pictures acquired from a single picture-taking session) to each of the scenes that have been picked up.